I left Palestine about a week ago and spent most of the time since either trying to get through the Israel/Jordan border or staring at the ceiling of a guest house in Damascus sick. I've spent most of that time thinking about the West Bank, so it is hard to concentrate on new countries. I'm feeling better now, but I miss my friends there and wonder what is going on with them. By a weird twist of luck, I spent the day after I left Jayyous taking a bus up to the northern crossing to get a new Jordanian visa, and when I boarded the bus, I looked at a sea of olive drab. Everyone on the bus was a teenager with a semi-automatic weapon draped over their laps. My mouth went dry when I boarded, because I thought, what a target. Almost no civilians. Aside from the guns and uniforms it could have been a high school bus to a state basketball tournament or something, which is not right somehow. But people not too different from these were doing things to families and kids that I still can't fathom. The one next to me seemed bored and a little sad, but was polite and helpful. He seemed embarassed more than anything, especially when he scowled as he awkwardly folded his gun butt in to keep it from poking me in the ribs. There was not much to say.
I spent a couple of days in Amman after that getting sicker and sicker but unable to keep from staying up all hours of the night chatting with Fayez the manager of the Al-Saraya hotel and Eiko the Arabic-speaking newly-converted Muslim Japanese nurse who did work in Gaza, where the bombing and bulldozing and shooting is some of the worst (she was there when the Israeli military bombed an apartment block with no warning at rush hour, killing several children on their way to school), and then came to Jordan to renew her visa, but was turned back several times at the Israeli border and refused reentry. So instead she did some work for a hospital in Amman, although she misses her life and friends in Gaza terribly. She is the cutest thing I've ever seen in my life. Her polite, choppy Japanese Arabic, I will never think of it again without at least smiling. She had a heart so pure she didn't even realize she was anything special.
I took a service taxi from Amman to Damascus along with a Syrian, a Jordanian, and an Iraqi guy who showed me his passport with the holographic foil stamp with the man himself, Saddam Hussein, glowering from it. He's about as proud of that goofy-looking megalomaniac as I am of W.
By the time I got to Damascus I was pretty weak. I hadn't been hungry since I left Palestine, and I pretty much just took a bed and stayed there for about four days. I staggered up to take a look at the Umayyad Mosque, a splendid place with a courtyard covered partly in green and gold mosaic but mostly with white and colored marble, and I got confused and tired and sat near a column in the middle of the courtyard, and two different women came up to me and struck up a conversation in Arabic. My Arabic is still pretty poor, so we couldn't say much, but I said I was from America, they said I was welcome, they asked if I was traveling alone, I told them their little daughters were beautiful. They told me to quit sitting on cold stone especially if I was sick. It was sweet. I love mosques. A friend of mine told me a British family he knew was at the great mosque of Mecca along with hundreds of thousands of others, circling the main courtyard, when they were separated from their young son. They weren't afraid at all, though, in that place, and sure enough, a couple of rotations later, a stranger led their son back to them.
I also visited the Ruqaya mosque, an Iranian one with incredible shimmering mirror mosaics that reminded me of that ice mirror palace, I can't remember if it was in Superman the Movie or Conan the Barbarian. It shattered images and reflected colors gorgeously. The dome shone like diamonds.
Some girls from the hotel dragged me to a nearby hammam where I got scrubbed down by a butterball of an old lady and steam cleaned in the sauna. I swear she took my tan off. So much for that. My skin was soft as a baby's, though, and I felt much better... for about half an hour. Then back to the hacking cough and head cold.
I also visited the national museum and saw the stone tablet on which was inscribed the world's first alphabet. Lots of incredible mosaics, too, all taken from their sites scattered around Syria. A lot of things from Palmyra, out in the desert.
By the fourth day I couldn't take the Hotel California any longer. Everyone there seemed to have been there longer than I had. Some were tourists, some were British Muslims, one was a Sudanese who was living and studying there, and he kept feeding me and bought me some herbal tea for my cold. I needed a change of scene, though, so I hopped a service taxi to Beirut, and here I am, in a bright, modern, expensive city on the Med. The first night I just walked the whole place from Charles Helou to Pigeon Rocks and back, up through the Place de l'Etoile, which is the center of the newly restored downtown, really beautiful and expensive with very stylish people wandering around. It is pretty funny listening to all this French transliterated into Arabic and vice versa. The French owned this place for a while. Now everybody who's anybody speaks English and lives an awful lot like an American except more trendy, and there are Christians around as well as Muslims, so things are actually decorated for Christmas.
I met a boy at the clock tower whose brother is a member of Hezbollah, and he invited me to his neighborhood in the suburbs where his French and Arabic speaking mom fixed me a meal. Nice people. The wall between his bedroom and the living room had been blown out by a rocket years before, and it still hadn't been repaired. I'm staying at a lovely hostel near the bus station and plan to take several day trips from here up to The Cedars, Tripoli, and Byblos, and down to Tyre and Sidon, Phoenician cities from Biblical times. I'm feeling much better and believe things are looking up from here 'til I get home on Christmas Eve Eve.
Merry Christmas, Happy Eid, C Novim Godom.
Pam